


This Life One Leaf

by gloss



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, Verona Beach, post-DH
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-26
Updated: 2006-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caribbean gillyweed displays triple foliation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Life One Leaf

**Author's Note:**

> For Jaci, on her birthday, with much love.

#   
This Life One Leaf  


 _  
Time is a tree (this life one leaf)  
but love is the sky and I am for you  
just so long and long enough_ (Cummings)  


  


## 1\. Horti conclusi

At Dumbledore's funeral, Augusta found seats with Griselda Marchbanks and Minerva McGonagall  the last, and the best, of their year  but she kept her eyes on Neville.

He sat beside his friend with the pale hair and goggly eyes. His hands were knotted in his lap, his posture in forest-green dress robes (too short, they showed his ankles) as straight as she'd taught him. She noted his pallor, Alice's round face (*like a scone, Cousin Occam had once said), and his overall stillness.

Dumbledore's tomb was white, but Neville's cheek was flushing in the sun.

When the ceremony was over, Augusta's eyes were dry as ever but her chest was empty, leaden with the weight of all the loss.

She bade her grandson a brisk farewell, managing to adjust her hat, reclasp her pocketbook, and peck his cheek in a single movement. It was a gesture of avian grace, an egret dipping its head to test the flavors of the waters. No one knew how long she had taken to perfect such control.

Neville's eyes were distant as she touched his hand, rough from greenhouse work.

She did not know, precisely, what preoccupied him, nor was it in her nature to inquire. These days, it might have been anything. Terrible things were in the air again, foul stenches and anxiety pitched as high as a disturbed cone of wasps. Neville had always been a sensitive boy, that was it.

Too sensitive, she'd long believed, but on that bright June morning, she considered revising her opinion.

He had fought well against the Death Eaters; Minerva told her so, though Neville, when she visited him in the infirmary, claimed not to remember. Nor had he said anything at this time last year.

Her life, again, was being measured according to a calendar of battles, lists of survivors and casualties.

At Pomona Sprout's request, Neville was to remain at Hogwarts for a few weeks after Dumbledore's funeral. Something concerning the greenhouse expansion and a shipment due in from the continent, the note seeking her permission had said. Those plans had since changed.

Now, they were replanting calming and healing herbs, clearing out the teaching plants to make room for what would be necessary later.

She reached to pat his cheek  he had grown another few inches since Christmas  and said, "We'll see you in July, then."

*

In mid-July, Neville returned home with sunburnt cheeks and blistered hands. Augusta greeted him with a brittle embrace. She was not accustomed to the gesture and doubted she'd accomplished it very well.

"How was your journey?" She drew back, her arms aching oddly, as if his body had been imprinted on her skin. It would be almost another month before he could Apparate; even when he did become of age, she doubted he would pass the test. At any rate, Neville had, early on, developed an intense, inexplicable fondness for Muggle travel. This was the third summer he had returned home on British Rail.

"Long," Neville replied, the side of his mouth quirking up.

"I've ordered you new dress robes," she told him. "They're in your wardrobe."

He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it. Then, shaking his head slightly, he said, "I don't need new dress robes. Do I need new dress robes?"

"The Weasley girl owled you," she said as she set out the tea things. "I answered on your behalf. You're escorting her at her brother's wedding."

"Oh," Neville said and took his customary seat to her right. "Oh, well, then."

Augusta passed him a plate of biscuits. "The sun suits you."

Neville blinked a few times, then ran his hand through his hair.

"It's cooling," she said, tapping his tea-cup with her finger. "Drink up."

After a moment, Neville said, "Thanks, Gran."

His voice was soft and hoarse. Almost unused, but, on reflection, she realized that made sense. He probably hadn't had much call to speak, not in the greenhouses. Not unless it was to his plants.

Absently, Augusta rubbed her arms and smiled again. He was growing even faster than his father had. Soon, he'd outstrip them all.

  


## 2\. Two Weddings

"You made it!"

Ginny hugged him hard, her eyes dark and wet with tears when he stumbled up the path to the Burrow. He'd gotten lost four times on the way south; whenever he blinked, lines of text from bus timetables glowed behind his lids.

The first (last) time he'd been here was for her brother Bill's wedding. That was just before Harry set off to find Snape and Voldemort. Just a few weeks before everything started going to hell. Now, circled in Ginny's fierce grip, Neville remembered that they had passed out of hell. Here they were, having emerged on its other (far) side, blinking against the light, confused and disoriented. There were far fewer of them than had entered and, as they stumbled out into peacetime, the landscape was changed, the roads led elsewhere.

"You made it!" Ginny said again, and then a third time. "Oh, _Neville_ , come in, come in, you remember Kevin?"

Neville did not, in fact, remember Kevin Whitby. He knew him only as a Hufflepuff, several years behind him, and as the name on the invitation to Ginny's wedding. But he shook hands with the tall, slight man, smiled, and sat down to a late dinner.

Afterwards, Ginny offered to show Neville up to his room.

"Somehow I don't suppose I'll be sleeping in your room this time?" Neville asked. To his relief, Kevin laughed and clapped Ginny on the shoulder.

The last time he was here, he had been given a bedroll in Ron's room, but Harry and Hermione and Ron had turfed him out. He took shelter in Ginny's tiny room. "That was fun, you know."

Teasingly, Ginny poked his bad arm, then covered her mouth when he winced. "Sorry! Oh, God, I'm sorry, I didn't "

"It's all right." Neville massaged the ache and hid the pain with a smile. "Don't worry about it."

"Is it very bad still?" she asked as she took his hand and drew him upstairs.

"Comes and goes," he said as she pushed open the door to what he remembered had been the twins' room. It had been Ginny's quick thinking, a salve of asphodel and an unbruising charm, that had saved his arm from amputation after Goyle's tripled-Frangio curses hit him.

Skele-Gro had not been produced for about a year by then; they made do with what they had. However much it hurt, then and still, Neville knew he'd gotten off easy. Skin of his teeth, a blow that shattered others just glancing past him.

*

The crowd of guests at Ginny's wedding was much smaller than at Bill's. Neville circled the outside of conversations, mingling without touching. This wedding was nothing like Bill's, yet he could not help comparing the two.

Now, Ginny wore robes of black and purple, shades shifting together like the faces of Penitent Pansies; then, she was dressed in pale gold, matched to Fleur and Gabrielle's coloring, though she towered over delicate Gabrielle and scowled whenever she was complimented.

And Ginny was happy now, purely and thoroughly so, as she had been snarky and miserable then.

He raised his glass  Butterbeer, untasted lest he redevelop the tastes the war had formed for analgesic potions  when she caught his eye. She had her arm around Kevin's shoulders, hanging off him and laughing, her ginger hair streaming against the twilit sky. The others were here, too, the ones that were left  Luna and Tonks, Shacklebolt and Charlie Weasley, Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws and one pissed-to-the-gills Slytherin, toasting Ginny, teasing Kevin.

They had all been friends once. Never like Harry, Hermione, and Ron, but something almost as good. Comrades full of trust, wound with razor-wires of anxiety. When it was all over, those wires snapped free and shredded their skins.

When the lanterns had been lit, swaying from the trees and disrupting the shadows, Harry appeared. Off in the fields, he approached silently, sliding into the crowd without fanfare.

Harry's face was drawn, his eyes smudged with exhaustion; he wore Muggle clothes, a loud silky shirt of electric blue and tight gray pants.

"America," Neville heard him tell a Ravenclaw who'd asked where he was these days. So that confirmed the rumors that the _Prophet_ and the American _Morning Mage_ had been printing.

Harry drained his glass of Muggle vodka, then refilled it with a flick of his finger.

"And you?" Harry asked, transfiguring Neville's drink to match his own, not quite looking at him.

"Home," Neville told him. He was working with Muggle plants these days  Fingered Sedge, Thread Rush, Sea Birdweed  examining them for latent magic. Squib plants, his family called them, but they'd been wrong about him, too.

Angelina Johnson, wobbling on high heels, threw herself at Harry's chest, whooping like a savage. Harry caught her with one arm around her waist, steadied her, kissed her cheeks.

"You should see the new world," he was saying, and this time, he met Neville's eyes.

Over Angelina's riot of braids, woven with scarlet and gold threads, Harry looked at Neville. Neville swallowed the vodka in one gulp, disconcerted by the gaze, both eager and fearful for it to continue.

At Bill's wedding, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had kept to themselves. In itself, that was nothing new, but their intimacy had assumed, in the weeks since Dumbledore's funeral, an almost feverish, harried quality. Any proximity to their circle made Neville's skin prickle, exactly as if he'd brushed up against a pot of Furious Foxtails, jalapeno-hot and terribly itchy.

And he had learned _not_ to do that in his first year.

"Worse than a Fidelius," Ginny had said after Bill and Fleur rode away on their broomsticks, when Hermione, Ron and Harry piled into Harry's old Astra and bounced down the lane, away. "Those three, bloody secret-keepers."

Ginny was very drunk, sitting in Neville's lap and playing with his wand. She wasn't heavy, and Neville welcomed the closeness, even if it meant sharp bones and drunken recriminations.

"They're friends," Neville said. He'd always defended Harry, but only now did it occur to him to wonder why.

Ginny snorted. "So're we. Wouldn't know it, the way they act."

I know it, Neville thought. He was forgetful, truly his parents' child, but he knew a few things for sure.

*

As the war metastasized, their circle had widened again, the wires pulling back in Ginny and Luna, Neville and Seamus, but Neville could not forget how flat Harry's eyes had become, as if he could see nothing but Ron and Hermione, Snape and Voldemort.

As if nothing was as real as those four, two loved, two loathed.

Harry detached himself neatly from Angelina, settling her into a lawn chair. "Happy birthday, Neville."

The twilight had vanished, swallowed up by long black shadows, and the air was suddenly much cooler.

"How ?" No one remembered Neville's birthday, not since they'd buried Gran three years before. "Oh. The prophecy."

He deflated, realizing that. Another of his near-misses  the first and the most important, to be sure, but still, at root, just one more unknowing escape.

"Don't set too much store by prophecies. Cheers." As he refilled their glasses, Harry simply smiled.

After a moment, his eyes dulled back down to secretive stoniness and he turned to greet Charlie Weasley. When Neville next looked for him in the crowd, Harry was gone. He might never have been there.

  


## 3\. Avenida Herbazal

No one ever really knew Harry Potter. Neville certainly had no claim to knowing him, not even after six years in the same dormitory (nightmares and games of Snap, drinking contests and more nightmares), nor after years of war. Everyone who had known Harry, however partially, was gone  Voldemort and Dumbledore, Ron and Hermione.

"I can't say that I do know where he is," Lupin told Neville when Neville visited him in York. On the windowsill in his bedroom, Neville raised the marifisa that Lupin had taken to adding to the Wolfsbane potion. Usually Neville owled the herbs, supplemented by blood sausages and smoked game from the estate, but this time, he delivered them in person.

Lupin's study, overlooking the minster, was as shabby and shadowed as the man himself, which Neville found that comforting. He did not take easily to people, but Lupin's lack of pretense, the egg yolk on his jumper and inkstains on his fingers, reminded Neville, strangely enough, of his gran.

At one point during the war, when everything was topsy-turvy, Neville had entertained daydreams of falling for Lupin. Moving in with him, studying potions again to make the Wolfsbane. Perhaps getting a Kneazle.

"Everyone says he's hiding among American Muggles," Neville put in.

Lupin smiled thinly. "Harry went over there a while ago, he seems to move around a lot."

Neville nodded, rising, getting ready to make his apologies and Floo away.

"None of that," Lupin said, waving Neville back down. He riffled through a drawer, shuffled papers and parchment on his desk blotter, and finally handed Neville a small Muggle postcard. "This might help."

"Oh," Neville said. "Thank you."

The card depicted a towering, Amazon-huge woman in a skimpy bikini concocted out of, as far as Neville could make out, bits of tinsel. She stood, hands on her ample hips, in the middle of a beach, a carnival wheel behind her. Written in embossed silver script across her thighs was _Greetings From Verona Beach_.

On the reverse, Harry had scratched out with a Muggle pen  "Card says it all. Hope the moon's treating you all right."

Lupin stood now at the narrow window, face pale in the wan sunlight. "It's such a tiny world, ours. Can't blame him for escaping."

Neville turned the card in his hand. There was a greenhouse in Verona Beach that he'd read about, a conservation effort and plants that survived nowhere else.

*

No one knew Harry, no one knew where he was. Neville would have laughed at himself  of all people!  for having tried to find him. If, that is, he were not so sunburned that it hurt to _breathe_ , never mind laugh.

Here he was, sitting on the edge of a boardwalk overlooking filthy sand, shivering and sweating in the heat of a subtropical night, drunk on cocktails he could not spell, unable to find his hotel. And he'd thought he could find Harry bloody Potter? The Boy Who Fled, the one who hid, who'd vanished among Spanish-speaking Muggles in this phantasmagoric city.

Verona Beach was like nothing Neville had ever seen. Like Blackpool gone (more) monstrously garish and tawdry. Vivid as some hallucination born from Perverse Poppies and Wildeyed Whort seeds, but even that comparison could not capture quite how disorienting this place was.

He'd walked the streets for days, cast locus-charms and seek-spells until his wand hand ached. All he had to show for it were second-degree burns from the relentless sun.

This was the perfect place for Harry to get lost in. Magic of all sorts tingled and prickled in the air, both familiar and all kinds of alien, borne on winds that smelled like coconut oil and tears.

Neville had given up finding Harry several days ago.

Even now, when the dead of night gave way to the wee hours, the city was alive with light and noise, shrieking car horns and bass-heavy dance music, tinkling laughter and the occasional scream.

"You need a vacation, Neville," he said out loud, "go on, Neville, treat yourself. Git."

Below his dangling feet, the sea writhed and licked at the sand. Strands of Caribbean gillyweed were strung out at the water's edge, washed up to dry and crisp in the next day's sun. He stared at the fronds as if he could read them.

Dark as serpents, the gillyweed refused to be decoded. Neville settled for observing its differences from the Mediterranean variety. Triple, rather than double, foliation.

A voice cut through the noise, just behind him  "Bleeding cocksucking _Christ_!"  followed by a thump.

He knew that sound, the dull heaviness of a body hitting ground. He spun around, burnt skin stretching and flaming in protest. Silvery hair spilled out toward him, the sheen of a gold dress much duller behind.

"Are you all right?" He helped the woman up, brushing the hair from her dark face. _Veela_ , he'd thought for a moment, but she was human, and she was not, originally at least, a she.

"Fucking heels, fucking boardwalk, it's all so _fucking_ " The woman gestured at the broken heel of one gold boot, then stopped when Neville drew his wand and murmured, "Reparo."

"Hey," she said, gazing down at her boots, carmine lipstick shining as she grinned. "That's . Whoa."

Her name was Lili  _with an I, like_  D'Fields and, she told Neville over a stack of pancakes at the chrome-and-neon diner at the end of the boardwalk, he was not the first Englishman with a wand who'd helped her out.

"And when I say wand, I don't mean " She pointed down  to her crotch, Neville realized, not something on the floor he could not see. "Lotta weird shit around here, but you two take the cake."

Lili was no Veela  Neville had met a troop of them at Bill's wedding, and it was their mooncold beauty, for which he'd felt nothing but a slight discomfort, that proved to him once and for all that he fancied men  but she was beautiful, in a terrifying and garish sort of way, and she insisted on taking Neville to meet his _dappled-gangbanger_.

"Soon as you eat, that is," she said, crossing muscular arms over her plump breasts. "Son, you look half-starved."

That wasn't, precisely, true; Neville had always had big bones, and he ate when he remembered, or when his plants were not ready to be picked.

The Globe was a rickety old theater perched on the edge of the endless beach, just off the pitted asphalt of Avenida Herbazal. If Neville had ever believed in omens, the battered street sign would have been a grand one. He did not, however, so he followed Lili.

His head swam in the heat coming off her skin, the richness of her perfume. Gardenias, he guessed, and lemongrass. She preceded him up the stairs to the pool hall, sure and quick on the heels that had to be six inches high, then pushed him into the room.

Harry leaned over an uneven pool table, cue in his hand, lining up a shot. His eyes matched the table's baize.

Seeing him, Neville remembered _everything_ , Harry crouched, weeping, over the empty serpent skin, all that Voldemort had left behind, and the sight of Trevor's rump vanishing as he made another bid for escape, and Ginny casting "Revivo" again and again over the scorch marks where Hermione had been, and Snape's sneer over the melted cauldron, blurred and then sharp in the green smoke curling off the failed boils-curing potion. Gran's tiny form, wound in its shroud, and the Irish Sea rushing up at him as Algie shouted. Dumbledore's white tomb, the green lake behind.

Not everything green was evil; far from it.

Neville remembered, then rubbed the back of his neck. Memory retracted to a pinpoint, then flickered out.

"All right, Harry?" Neville said. For a moment, he wondered whether he'd spoken at all; he hadn't been able to hear himself over the din, like the sea, in his ears.

Harry was straightening up, setting aside the cue, and grasping Neville's bad arm in both his hands. His touch was ache and balm all at once, friction on the sunburnt skin and broken bones and cool, clear springwater, frost over winter gardens.

"Yeah," Harry said. "All right."

Lili might have pushed him, Harry might have pulled him, but Neville kissed Harry all on his own. Outside, the sky wheeled on fireworks, green and gold, whirling explosively.

He didn't know Harry, maybe never would, but Neville embraced him and knew himself.


End file.
